Making Mountains out of Mole Hills or in this Case Foam

Making scenery can be the one of the most daunting aspects to building a model railroad. I read a whole libraries worth of books and magazines to figure out how they built these amazing models but to be honest they can be pretty confusing to say the least. Every author has a different view on how to make scenery. I had previously tried my hand at hard shell scenery but quickly grew discouraged with it because of the mess and I quite frankly hated the look of it. So I shelved the idea of a model railroad.
Skip forward 6 years and my wife had a porcelain Christmas village she wanted to set up under the tree. So we went to the store to look at some accessories for her village and they had a video on how to build department 56 villages with Styrofoam. We then built a mountain out of foam that my G scale train ran through. But again the same problem of mess was there. they said on the video to use knives to cut the foam but the bead foam just made a heck of a mess and it stuck to me, the carpet, the walls, heck even the ceiling. I got banished outside if I needed to cut anymore foam and December is a sucky month to be banished outdoors in Utah.
Last year we again put a village under the tree but we are now using On30 that scales properly with the village unlike the G scale which is like twice as big as the buildings. we had managed to acquire a hot wire tool from department 56 that we used to build some hills but to be honest I wasn't that impressed with it. It was hard to use and couldn't cut that thick of foam but it did not make near the mess that knives did.
Now we move to 2009 and I'm at The Big Train Show and my wife and I see this booth selling the Foam Factory hot wire cutter. they had this display set up that showed how easy it was to cut the foam in multiple thicknesses and densities. I was hooked but so was the CFO. She plunked down the plastic and we caught a flight home. Now it was time to play with some foam!
My Father in Law had built a test shelf to see how things would go together for the real layout and I started playing with different ideas on that shelf. I was excited at the possibilities my wife was excited and my Father in Law was excited. We now needed to lay a shelf. But hold on First we (that's my Father in Law and I with directions from my Wife and Mother in Law) needed to paint the room a different color.

The original color was brownish pink color highlighting the sun in all aspects to the arizona sky invoking the subtle color changes found here from sunrise to sunset the paint manufactures called it Desert Rose, My Mother in Law called it Butt Ugly (in so many words) and it had to go! She picked a more traditional Tan color and Lamont and I started painting but that desert Rose was not going to be covered up without a fight. 3 complete coats later we were ready to place the first shelves.